


may your days be merry and bright

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Holidays, Jemma POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 05:26:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2839664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This time, when she feels the empty space beside her, Jemma will go looking for the boy who can fill it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	may your days be merry and bright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fitzsimmonsy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzsimmonsy/gifts).



_i. jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way_  
“The Christmas season doesn't start until December 1st, you know,” Jemma says dryly, watching Skye drape tinsel around the living room of the Bus. Skye has to stand on top of the table in order to reach the ceiling and if it were any other year, Jemma might already be giggling. But if it were any other year, Fitz would be there, telling her to stop being a Grinch and offering to make her his famous mulled wine, and there wouldn't be this empty space by her side that's starting to feel much too familiar. She used to know what he was going to say before he said it, and now it seems like neither of them can hear what the other is saying at all. So Jemma hugs a pillow to her chest and lets herself indulge in another wave of self-pity. She's going to stop soon, she promises herself, she's going to move on and let him go, like the way he's already let go of her. And she's still going to complain about starting Christmas early, because some things need to stay the same in a world of monsters and aliens and dragging your best friend up from the bottom of the ocean.

“The Christmas spirit runs year-round, Jemma,” Skye says lightly from the table and then notices the way Jemma's hugging the pillow when she turns to drape more tinsel over the light fixtures. She gets down almost immediately, crossing to sit beside Jemma on the couch. “Hey, are you okay? You look like you're trying to become one with that pillow.”

“I'm fine. Or, I'm going to be fine,” she corrects herself. “Transitional periods are always hard, but I'm going to be just great!” She tries to smile, but she can hear the way that her voice nearly breaks at the end of it. 

“Is there someone I can beat up for you?” Skye asks and Jemma giggles faintly. She knows that Skye's joking but there's a steely edge to her voice now, one that comes from training with Melinda May, that lets her know some part of Skye really means it. It's strangely comforting. 

“It's not as simple as that,” Jemma says. “I messed up and he messed up and we—did I ever tell you about my first year at the Academy?” Skye shakes her head. “My parents were spending Christmas in Australia, digging up some rare rocks, and they told me that coming home for Christmas would be impractical, so I was stuck at the Academy. Fitz was there too, because SHIELD wouldn't pay for his flight home—we'd just started being friends properly—and he decided that together, we were smart enough to arrange fifteen days worth of Christmas festivities. He even tried to chop down a Christmas tree.” The tree had nearly fallen on him, but they'd managed to drag it back to their dorm room, drape it with Jemma's orchid-shaped fairy lights and some tacky ornaments from the convenience store ten miles away, sneak into the electrics lab, and rig up a star to go on top. They'd made mulled wine and hot cocoa, and decorated their gingerbread men like each of the Doctors, and watched an endless succession of cheesy made-for-TV movies that Fitz claimed he didn't like. Really, it hadn't even been the things they'd done together, it had been the fact that for the first time she could remember, there had been someone who looked at her and just saw _her_. Not the nubile young prodigy, not the girl who ruined the curve, not a bossy know-it-all/Hermione Granger in training, not someone to get something from. Fitz looked at her and only saw Jemma.

“You must be missing him a lot,” Skye says softly.

“I miss him all the time,” Jemma replies. “Just more now.” She's missed him since the water came rushing into the pod, and maybe that's the problem—sometimes she still misses a Fitz that's long gone and she tries to see what's in front of her, she really does, but everything's a blur in her head and there's a part of her that wants all their old uncategorisable categories back.

“He's right there,” Skye gestures in the direction of the garage. “I think if you went to talk to him, he'd let you.”

“He doesn't listen to me. Or I don't listen to him. Or maybe both.” Jemma brings the pillow up to cover her face and groans into it. After a while, Skye pokes her and she looks up to see a strand of silvery tinsel and a glass of eggnog being dangled in front of her face. Skye winds the tinsel through her hair, batting Jemma's hand away when she reaches up to brush it off, and offers her the glass.

“It's spiked,” Skye says with a wicked grin. “I stole some of the good stuff from Coulson's private stash.”

“Well, then...” She takes the glass, drinks, and, a few minutes later, she even lets Skye con her into helping hang up mistletoe. Jemma's just on the edge between tipsy and drunk when she heads back to her bunk an hour and a half later, and just before she reaches her door, she decides to stop by the garage. She can't say that it's on her way, because it's not, but she's drunk just enough to feel optimistic about it.

Fitz is still in the garage, like she knew he would be, frowning at the tablet and tapping on it, only to frown more fiercely at it. _He has nice hands, doesn't he?_ She knocks against the wall of the garage, pushing the thought to the back of her mind before she starts to blush, and he glances up at her. “J—Jemma?”

“Hi,” she waves awkwardly. “I was passing by and I--”

“You really don't have to--” he stammers.

“No, I--”

“I know that you--”

“Just let me talk, Fitz!” she bursts out. “Just let me talk for a minute and then I'll be gone, all right?” He nods silently. “I thought it was my fault. For taking the oxygen, for not finding a way to get us both out safely. And then you woke up and I wanted to make you better, but I only made you worse.” He opens his mouth but she cuts him off. “I know that I made you worse. So I left, but that seemed to make you worse too. I didn't know what to do to help—I still don't. But maybe if you tell me what I can do...” _Maybe we can figure out what we are now._ “I know that we can't snap our fingers and make everything all right again, but I want to try. I want you back in my life, Fitz.” she says stubbornly. “Will you let me say that?”

“You, um...you just did. Okay,” he nods.

“Okay.” She turns to go, making her way down the cargo ramp and then she remembers something else and twists back over her shoulder to tell him. “I don't think you're useless,” she says fiercely. “I have never thought that and I never will.” And then she's gone, the bravery from talking to Skye and from the alcohol in her veins suddenly vanished, and her tongue suddenly silent.

This time, she feels his eyes on her when she walks away.

 

 _ii. deck the halls with boughs of holly_  
“Fa-la-la-la-la-la-laaaaaaa,” Skye hums, loudly and off key

“Skye, is this even legal?” Trip asks. “And is there a reason why my room is covered in fir?”

“Oh, definitely. In a small island nation somewhere in the middle of the Pacific.” The hacker pulled a candy cane out of her mouth and punched a few buttons on the remote. “And it's festive.”

“Who did you hack this time?” Jemma pauses in the doorway, regarding Skye suspiciously. “Sharon Carter had to smooth things over with the CIA the last time you decided to look up the files on the JFK assassination. You made Peggy Carter's niece buy people coffee!”

“I'm just getting the Harry Potter movies for Trip. Wounded in the line of duty and all of that. Plug this in for me?” Skye hands her a long black cord and Jemma complies. “Want to watch? We have microwave popcorn, and I'll even put some of those weird seasonings in it for you.”

“There's nothing weird about savory popcorn,” Jemma counters as she goes to curl up on the couch by Trip's bed. The base medic had ordered him to be on bed rest for at least three weeks and a week and a half in, Trip is already going crazy. He'd even tried to go along the mission to Puerto Rico, but Jemma had caught him and ordered him back to bed, ignoring his protests that she wasn't a medical doctor. Now, thinking about what happened there—the shaking and the walls crumbling around them, the powers that Skye really doesn't want to talk about—she's incredibly glad that she did. “Not all of us coat it in sugar like you and Leo do.” She doesn't realize that she's said his name until Skye and Trip are staring at her, jaws open and hands hovering right over the bowl of popcorn. “He covers it with cinnamon sugar,” she explains. “It's so sweet that it'll rot your teeth.”

“Jemma,” Skye says. “You said his name. His first name. No one ever says Fitz's first name.”

“It just slipped out,” she shrugs, hoping to sound casual, and reaches over to snag a handful of popcorn. She hasn't called him Leo in years, not since the night of their graduation, spinning giddily with him around her room and planting a messy kiss on his cheek that brushed over the corner of his mouth. They'd fallen asleep curled up together on top of her covers, her practically sprawled across his chest, and promptly agreed to never speak of it again when they woke up. “It's his name—people call him by it,” she leaned forward, hoping to distract them. “So are we starting with Philosopher's Stone?”

“Coulson will be so happy when he hears that you called Fitz Leo. Like Captain America levels of happy,” Skye says happily. “So you guys talked?”

“More like I talked. Hopefully he listened.” It's his move now, she thinks. Just like chess. She's told him the truth, as best she could, and now she wants to hear his, whatever it is. “So...are we starting with Philosopher's Stone?”

“It's the Sorcerer's Stone,” Trip says automatically.

“Well, in England it was the Philosopher's Stone. They must have thought that Americans wouldn't be too keen on philosophy, and they were probably right,” she replies, arching an eyebrow.

“We like philosophy!” Skye protests. “Unalienable rights, and all of that. Anyway.” Skye hits a button and the screen comes to life as she collapses backwards onto Trip's bed. He doesn't mind. “Harry. Hogwarts. Magic. Now.” They watch in rapt near-silence for the next two hours, steadily eating popcorn, eyes fixed on the screen, only interrupted when Skye starts shouting warnings at the characters on screen and Jemma goes on a long tangent about the possibility of recreating some of the potions. They've just started Chamber of Secrets, complete with a cauldron of Skye's gingerbread hot chocolate (probably also spiked, Jemma suspects) when Fitz peers into Trip's room.

“Sorry,” he blurts out. “I just wanted to come by and say hi to Trip. I brought a book in case you needed something to read but it looks like you're busy so I'll just--”

“Come watch with us,” Jemma says it fast and all at once, so it comes out more like one long incomprehensible string of words than a proper English sentence, but he understands her anyway. “We've just started the second one—we even have snacks!” She brandishes the popcorn bowl at him like it's a trophy and immediately feels ridiculous.

“Sure,” he says slowly and comes into the room, still clutching a fat paperback copy of _The Return of the King_ , which he hands to Trip before he realizes that the only place to sit in the room is beside Jemma. For a moment, they're all holding their breath and then he slowly starts to make his way over to the couch and perches on the opposite end from her. When she passes him the popcorn bowl, he has to stretch all the way across in order to grab it and nearly topples over in the process. Over on the bed, Skye looks like she's about to choke from the effort of trying to hold her laughter in and when Fitz shoots her an offended look, Skye just rolls her eyes at him, hard enough that Jemma can practically hear it.

“They're about to fly the Ford Anglia,” Jemma offers. “You like this part, right?”

“Yeah, I do. When I was younger, I actually tried to—tried to—I, um—I tried,” He shakes his hand out at his side, over and over, and the story that he's trying to tell is on the tip of her tongue, but she doesn't know if she's allowed to tell it, if her words still match up with hers. They've had moments, like in San Juan, where the beginnings of her sentences caught the ends of his and her smile was something she meant, but they've barely talked since then. He's in the garage with Mack and she's in the lab with a half dozen junior scientists who obey her every word and never understand them. And she is overthinking this far too much.

“You wanted to build a flying car?” she says tentatively. “I remember you showing me some of your old designs at the Academy.”

“I would sneak out past my bedtime and mess around with my mum's car. Never made it fly, of course,” he shrugs. “If Coulson would give me the specs for—for--”

“For Lola. But there's file boxes full of old designs in the--” she remembers.

“In the SHIELD vaults. Even if Coulson won't let anyone actually work on the car, we could still smuggle something out and adapt it a little.” He sounds far too excited about breaking into classified vaults.

“You just want your mum to take a flying car to get her groceries,” she teases and he actually laughs. Then Skye hits play on the movie again and Fitz leans forward eagerly, turning to tell her about the special effects they're using in an excited whisper. As she nods along and whispers back, she can feel a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. By the time they've moved on to Prisoner of Azkaban, he's edged over into the middle of his side of the couch, close enough that they can balance the bowl of popcorn between them. By the Yule Ball, his shoulder brushes against hers from time to time and she leans into the touch, seeking the jolt of warmth that comes with it. And by Dumbledore's death, sometime around three in the morning, she's discreetly crying into his sweater while Trip and Skye exchange not so discreet high fives in between their own tears. 

When Hermione performs the memory charm on her parents at the beginning of Deathly Hallows, he leans down and whispers in her ear. “I understand why you left.”

This time, when he looks at her, she looks back.

 _iii. walking in a winter wonderland_  
Jemma can hear the Christmas music playing as she walks up the ramp to the garage and...is that tinsel on Lola? That's definitely tinsel. Multi-colored tinsel. Clearly, Fitz has gone Christmas crazy without someone around to balance him out and clearly that someone needs to be her—Mack is wearing a Santa hat, so he's automatically ineligible. She'll start by bribing him with gingerbread men to take at least half of the tinsel down, then she'll work on establishing designated hours for the lights, then she'll--

“Have you switched over to making house calls, doc?” Mack pulls himself out from under the car he's been working on when he hears her approach. “I was just about to head over to the lab for my shot.” She's developed a compound that counteracts the effects of the Obelisk but so far, it only works through injection, at least twice a day, so she and Mack have a routine. He appears in the lab, she prepares the compound, they nod politely at each other, and they avoid talking about Fitz.

“I was done early, so I thought that I could just drop by.” Not technically a lie—she finished early so she could drop by. “Besides, Skye told me about the gingerbread Bus and I had to see it for myself.” Also not technically a lie—she may have interrogated Skye for a full fifteen minutes about what kind of Christmas decorations Fitz had put up. Just in case an intervention was needed, she tells herself. Which it obviously is. The kind of intervention that she gets so distracted planning that she forgets to tell Mack that she technically isn't a medical doctor.

“Jemma!” Fitz appears just after she's finished with the injection, emerging from underneath a table with a huge smear of oil across his shirt and a variety of small mechanical parts sticking out of his pockets. 

“Hi,” she says and waves awkwardly at him. Why did she wave at him? He's right there—why does she need to wave at him?

“Hi,” he beams at her. They stand there for a minute, smiling at each other and fidgeting from foot to foot, until Mack clears his throat (loudly) and Fitz seems to remember something. “I had a design that I was hoping you would take a look at,” he blurts out. “If you have the time? I don't want to bother you.”

“Of course I do.” Jemma really doesn't. Yet she pulls up a chair and examines the design anyway, five different-sized sheets of paper covered with scribbles and diagrams and a lot of arrows pointing in different directions. Five minutes later, she's making notes all over it in her neat script. Ten minutes later, Fitz is making notes over her notes. Fifteen minutes later, they're arguing and twenty minutes later, they've made up. When she finally leaves, it's only because one of her minions claims that something is turning green (it isn't even green, more like chartreuse) and she has a pile of papers in her arms and a whirlwind of ideas in her head.

After that, she starts stopping by the garage to give Mack his injections every day, claiming that it's more efficient. It's not. But Fitz always has another modification to the design, or another question, or another thing that they have to fix together and the more that they work together, the easier it gets. There are still silences, filled with all the things they lack the courage to say, and there are still topics they avoid with all the subtlety of a train wreck, but they can work together. They've always been able to work together.

“I missed this,” she tells him one day, as they're testing different delivery mechanisms, after she's talked him out of a design involving clusters of wickedly sharp spikes. “Us. Working together.”

“I did too,” he admits and smiles at her from across the lab table. “There's no one...no one...no one quite like you. No one else has the, um...the psychic link. I'll have to tell Skye that she was right.”

“I wanted this back so badly,” Jemma whispers. “I kept on trying to find it again. Not because I thought you needed my help, but because I needed us to be us again.”

“You wanted everything to go back to the way it was. I know.” He says it gently and carefully, voice lowered and every syllable sounded out, like he's been practicing saying it for a long time, and it hurts a thousand times more than if it had been meant to. “I'm not going to sulk like a sullen teenager anymore if you tell me that you don't want me the same way I want you.”

“I don't know what I want,” she says quietly. 

“Jemma, you don't have to--”

“ _Fitz._ I don't know what I want,” she repeats. “I just need some time.”

“Oh.” His eyes go wide. “Okay. All the time you need. But you—you--you won't leave again? No matter what you decide?”

“Never again,” Jemma promises and reaches across the table to lay her hand over his. It fits perfectly. Later, when she's headed back to her own lab, Mack runs to catch up with her in the hangar. (Though it's a little inaccurate to call it running—one of Mack's steps equals about ten of hers.)

“He looks at you like you're the sun,” Mack says matter-of-factly. “And you look at him like you wouldn't mind burning up as long as he was by your side. Be careful not to burn too bright.” And then Mack's gone again and Jemma's left with the realization that Mack sees far more than he lets on.

Three days later, Fitz marches into her lab with a pile of equipment and a determined look on his face. “Is there still space in the lab?” he asks shyly.

“There's always space for you,” she replies and moves over to make room for him, until she's at his shoulder, like always.

This time, when she rests her hand on his shoulder, he lets her.

 _iv. baby, it's cold outside_  
She wants to know what he looks like when he wakes up in the morning. The thought pops into her head while she's drinking her tea, glancing over at him when he's not looking, and it hits her with so much force that she nearly drops her mug. 

Jemma doesn't know if this means that he's more than that to her too, or if it means that they're ready to fall into each other's arms and live happily ever after, or if they'll ever be ready to define everything that they've left undefined. But she knows that she likes his eyes and his hands and his smiles and she wants to wake up next to him in the morning. And that's something.

“You're checking Fitz out,” a voice says from behind her and this time she really does drop her mug. Tea goes flying everywhere, shards of her mug land in the middle of the mess of her experiments, and when she whirls around, she sees Skye smirking at her.

“I am not!” Jemma splutters. “I may have been looking at him for a minute—I do a regular morning survey of the lab to make sure that everything's in place and that nothing's exploded overnight.

“You know, there are at least five different dirty jokes I could make there,” Skye informs her, swinging herself up to perch on a lab table. “I'm only refraining because it's Christmas.”

“I'm very grateful,” Jemma says dryly as she bends down to start sweeping up the shards of her mug. “And I was _not_ checking Fitz out.” Only maybe she was. A little bit. It's a strange feeling, this giddiness hovering around her stomach, the way that her eyes seem to constantly wander in his direction. Because she's felt it before, plunging into yet another flirtation with a well-muscled specialist, and yet something about this time feels different. Maybe it's the fact that she knows she loves Fitz, even if she's still finding all the ways that she does. Or maybe it's the fact that she knows that, once they begin, there's no turning back, that they've never done anything casually (and maybe that terrifies her just a little). Either way, Jemma Simmons is doomed. Because before, she had at least seven criteria that had to be fulfilled before she'd let someone buy her a drink and now, as she watches Fitz attempting (and failing) to sing both parts of “Baby, It's Cold Outside”, shirt buttoned the wrong way, gesticulating wildly with his mug and on the verge of knocking over some very delicate equipment, the butterflies in her stomach suddenly multiply by ten and she can practically feel her heart swelling in her chest.

“Someone should probably stop him before he breaks anything,” Mack comments fondly, looking between the two of them. 

“Mmm,” Jemma replies, still absorbed in noticing just how snugly Fitz's jeans fit as he bends over to check on their supply of indicators. If he's going to keep on doing that, maybe she ought to start keeping more of their supplies on low shelves. She sighs, leaning back against the lab bench, still holding the dustpan with the pieces of mug, and she could swear that she hears Mack chuckling.

Later, Fitz comes over to show her his latest prototype and her brain promptly decides to take a holiday. Instead of supplying her with the scientific terms she needs, it's going on lengthy tangents about how close he's standing to her and how good he smells and how blue his eyes are, and... “Jemma,” he's saying her name and it sounds like he's been saying it for a while. “Jemma, are you all right? Do you think you could be getting sick? Maybe you need more liquids? I can make you soup?”

“I'm fine. Just thinking,” she says hastily. “Sorry.”

“You still look flushed. Are you sure you don't have a fever?” he reaches over to press a hand to her forehead and then drops it almost instantly, blushing and stammering out an apology. But Jemma catches his hand when it falls, weaving her fingers through his, and squeezes. Hard.

“I'm okay. But thank you for worrying,” she whispers. _For caring._

“I'm making you tea,” he says firmly, trying to look calm and collected despite the fact that he keeps on sneaking glances down at their joined hands, grinning like a little boy on Christmas morning.

“I'll come with you. You always put too much sugar in,” she teases and as they head for the kitchen together, she's pretty sure that she hears Mack chuckle and give her a discreet thumbs up.

This time, she stays beside him the whole damn time.

_v. all I want for christmas is you_  
Jemma thinks that the song blaring from the radio is incredibly simplistic and cliched, and completely ignores the fact that it's possible to want more than one thing at once. For instance, right now, she'd like a new centrifuge for the lab, and for her minions to stop dropping things, and for Skye to believe that she can talk to Jemma about what happened to her in the temple, and for the Director to smile more. But, she finally admits, what she'd really like—what she really wants more than anything in the world—is Fitz. Any way that she can have him. 

“Jemma?” And there he is, like thinking about him conjures him up. “Jemma, maybe you should be a little gentler with that dough.” It's then that she realizes she's been attacking the cookie dough for the past five minutes and it's transformed into a lumpy, cracking glob.

“Did you think I ruined it?” she asks anxiously and frowns down at the dough. She pushes it across the table to him, like it's just another experiment, and he pokes at it with a finger and tries not to grimace. Fitz used to make the best Christmas cookies that she's ever tasted, even if he always insisted on giving all the snowmen fezes instead of top hats, and Jemma's tried to reconstruct his recipe from memory, but she's pretty sure she failed. Maybe she used too much butter? Or not enough sugar? Clearly, she just needs him to be hers again, to fix her recipes and answer her questions and complete her sentences and complete...her. 

Jemma wonders if, in the spirit of scientific ingenuity, she can use the cookie failure as a way to address the issue that she wants to kiss him and doesn't know if he still wants to kiss her, and probably she should just kiss him and find out, but she never goes into any kind of an experiment without preparation and she's fairly sure that she looks distinctly unkissable right now. She's covered in flour and her hair's everywhere and she looks far too distraught over cookies and...Fitz is looking at her like she's perfect. Looking at her in a way that makes her heart catch in her chest, and she begins to understand what Mack meant a few days ago, because right now the happiness that's starting to swell through her feels bright enough to power a thousand suns.

“Of course not. Maybe it looks a little...different,” he tilts his head, taking it in. “But it's going to be fine. It'll be new and familiar at the same time, and it'll still be good.”

“I get the feeling that you're talking about something other than cookies.” She takes a step around the table, towards him. 

“Trip and I had a long discussion about appropriate metaphors. So maybe I am.” He takes a deep breath. “I know that you still need time but I just wanted to let you know that I'll be here however long you need. For whatever you need. And if you decide that all you want is your best friend back, I'll be here for that too. It's a privilege to love you, Jemma Simmons, in whatever way I can and I'm so very grateful for it.”

Maybe this isn't the perfect moment, not when he still looks at her like she might disappear any moment and she still wakes up screaming his name. Maybe it isn't a beach at sunset or fireworks exploding in the distance or even the nearly unimaginable future where every day isn't a battlefield. Maybe there are still questions left to be answered and bridges left to be crossed. But it's them and it's real and it's here and now. It's the floury hand prints she leaves on his shirt, it's her mouth on his like it's always been meant to be there, it's her hand holding his steady when it shakes, it's the way his pulse beats as fast as her own. Jemma Simmons kisses Leo Fitz like it's the first and last time she'll ever kiss him and when she pulls back for breath, it's only a moment before she kisses him again.

This time, after she whispers that he's her best friend in the world, she tells him that he's more than that.


End file.
